My three year old cell phone began to restart itself intermittently a few weeks ago and I faced the fact that I probably needed a new cellphone. Since I was eligible for the “new for every two” program at VerizonWireless, I decided this past weekend to drop by the local store and see the phones for myself. Basically, I wanted to hold one before committing to it.

I managed to walk out of the store with the cheesy sounding the LG VX9800 - The V. Surprisingly enough, I thought I would walk out of the store with a Motorola phone, but I wasn’t impressed with the Razr or the 815E.

My initial thoughts about the LG is that I like the full keyboard, but I worry about the scratching the outside screen if I ever drop the phone. (My old Kyocera 2235 was built like a tank compared to this.) It feels a little bulky (although when I compared it to an older LG phone, the thickness was about the same) for my petite hands. I like the internal screen, the speakers and the lighted keyboard.

As for usability, I’m still getting used to the menus and specifically I’m still trying to figure out if I can set a one button shortcut to set the phone on vibrate. The vibrate mode is, uh, very attention getting. The Bluetooth feature did sync wonderfully with my PowerBook, although the phone’s OBEX profile (at least with OS X 10.3.9) only supports Address Book/Contact syncing and using the phone as a modem. No file transfer.

As for the other built-in features, I tried the 1.3mp camera at the concert I went to on Saturday night and I have about 35 1280 x 960 full size blurry pics of the stage from the second to last row in section 204 of the Tweeter Center. The phone does record 1 minute bits of sound, and while the sound from the stage wasn’t captured all that well, the phone picked up the chattering fo the audience members around me. I can get a MiniSD card to increase the phone’s memory if I want. Also, the Web browser on the phone doesn’t work with WordPress. Yes, I tried. :-P

Finally, kudos to the VerizonWireless salesguy who helped me. He didn’t try to upsell me on anything other than what I went in for.

[tags]VerizonWireless, gadget, cell phone, Bluetooth, geek[/tags]

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on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 12:54 am and is filed under General.
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[…] I’ve had an iPhone since forever and I apparently forgot that the second cell phone I ever owned was a Kyocera but that was back in 2003 or so and I had to procure a certain phone because I was living in Vermont which had a limited cell infrastructure…I do remember the 2003 era Kyocera had this newfangled “text messaging” capability. […]